How well did that 50 degree forecast work out for the BOM?

You could almost be forgiven for wondering if the Bureau of Meteorology is a science unit or a PR agency. They seem professionally adept at getting headlines, but not so hot at predicting the weather.

On Jan 7th the BOM models forecast 50 spanking hot degrees across hundreds of square kilometers in central Australia. But it was a whole week ahead, the prediction itself cooled with a day or two, and in the area under the “purple searing spot” the result on Jan 14th ended up being around 40C instead. That’s fine in itself — predictions are difficult. What’s not fine is the PR storm that ensued, which is still being used, as if somehow the very fact that our faulty climate models predicted a record temperature (but failed) is evidence of man-made global warming. How many thousands of people all around the world now think that Australia had a 50C plus day this January? Did anywhere hit the fifty mark? No report of one so far. Watch the loop of Australia’s January temperatures here. The highest brown bar on that graph is 45 – 48C, and those hot spots are a thousand kilometers from the purple patch.

That said, it was awfully hot for a couple of weeks. Birdsville got to 49C on Jan 13th. Moomba 49.6C on the 12th. But even these temperatures are not “a new climate”. How many people around the world realize that 50C plus days have occurred many times before across Australia? Even if it had got to 51C, there are many approximate equivalents in the last 180 years. It’s like trying to rewrite history. The BOM were probably 100 years too late in adding colors to the scale. They should have been there all along.

The wild PR success of the “new colours” meme, meant that newspapers all over the world carried yet another free but disguised advert promoting bad government policies, poor science, and fraud-prone and unnecessary marketing schemes. Did the BOM push this angle, or was it the media?

So the modelers get it wrong, yet score a PR success anyway. What pain and embarrassment ensued when people realized the fuss was overdone? (Why put out predictions with so much map detail, if the details are so unreliable?)

The prediction (left) versus reality (right). The scale on the prediction graph goes up to 54C, but the scale on the reality stops at 48C. (For scale Australia is 4,000 km across.)

Wired at least had a different take: “Australian Heat Wave Threatens Gadgets…” (This heat must be really serious).

The Economist got so excited they thought this heat wave would convert sceptics saying, “Some climate experts are convinced the 2013 heatwave will prove a turning-point in how Australians respond to warnings about human-induced climate change. In a country that relies on fossil fuels for much of its well-being (coal is the second-biggest export and produces about four-fifths of electricity), climate-change sceptics have often swayed political debate.”

(Let’s just say those unnamed climate experts predicting that a short heatwave will convert skeptics are probably the same ones predicting catastrophic warming, right? ‘Nuff said.)

Climate Central “researchers and reports the science of climate change”. You can tell a lot about the level of scientific understanding there, because they included a map of the world for their readers and circled the nation so the climate savvy readers knew where Australia was. At least they got that right.

The day before the predicted 50 degrees didn’t reach 50:

…

Nor did the following day:

The day after the 50C potential heatwave didn’t get that hot either.

By Jan 9th (one day after the big press explosion) the BOM knew the 50C max forecast was gone from the models, and they did say so. “Now you see it, now you don’t: weather bureau backtracks from 50-plus forecast”. Give them a point.But activists and commenters are still using the lines about the BOM adding color to the map as if it proves something about the climate. Groups like the Climate Institute are happy to repeat the meme to rewrite history:

Today’s record temperatures in Sydney come just 10 days after the Bureau of Meteorology added new colours, purple and pink, to its weather map to denote temperatures once considered off the scale: 50-52°C and 52-54°C respectively.

Equipment from 1800′s was probably as accurate as it was required to be … no more no less than today. In fact, there’s no equipment available today that can measure accuracy to 2 decimal places either.

Well exactly how damaging is it to have a temperature recorded as 32.6 Deg C instead of 32.64?

If the overnight minimum is 18.00 deg C then the missing 0.04 not recorded is just 0.20 % of that day’s range.

Also in may be useful to consider that at another time of the year the overnight minimum could be about 10 degrees.

The point I am making is that if the IPCC is trying to assess the “heat content” of the atmosphere then given all of the errors in assessment of so many known factors and the presence of hidden unquantified factors in the “models” ( better labelled as Guesstimates) yet to be announced by the mob at UEA and WWF, then the extra digit is effectively Irrelevant.

It might, however, be good PR to use the extra digit to suggest greater scientific accuracy for grant purposes but it has no impact on the Science.

It would appear that the last digit is not too relevant given the circumstances of the experiment.

Yawn. Nice One. Your amnesia is so uncool. We’ve done this conversation already. This the part where I remind you that you are demanding my money to solve a problem you reckon is catastrophic, but you still can’t provide a single paper with empirical evidence (the one I’ve been asking for for three years).
As for your “climate projection?” That’s satire again. Shucks. You should look it up…

Oh, dear, bless your little heart. The request by someone with a failed theory to have those showing how it fails come up with a different theory has been rebutted in the literature for many years. One example was on Climate Audit (CA) five or six years ago and went (something) like this: Suppose ‘JN’ as a mining engineer with impeccable credentials you are requested by XYZ Mining Co. to investigate claims by New Onion Co.’s flamboyant chief executive (NO) that his latest find is showing an abundance of Gold. So JN investigates using personal experience, scientific principles, and data manipulation skills – and then tells XYZ not to make an offer on NO’s property because the find has been overblown or out-right faked. Upon hearing this, NO says “Well then, if you are so smart, tell me where I can find a rich Gold deposit!” — squawks, stomps foot, slams door.

Ha ha,Jim Salinger forecast 40 plus degrees for the west coast South Island about 10 days ago.He was close.Temps reached mid twenties.FAIL

… no, he made the predicton for the South Island East coast. There’s a big difference: the wets coast is quite a bit cooler than the east coast as it catches all the cold air and rain directly from Antarctica. The East coast catches the dry and hot north easters from the mountains.

O/T I know but I put this up at Jennifer Marohasy’s blog and thought others may be interested.

The Petition Project has 31,000+ scientists and 9,000+ with Phds at their site. They are very sceptical of the warmist propaganda and have prepared this study covering a lot of issues of climate change.

The gray background is not part of any scenario – mentioned on the WUWT post where this graph is used.
While the drawing (Figure 1.4) is from the ‘draft report’ that will likely change, I have not seen any comments that the information in the drawing is incorrect. I point all this out because you mention posting at Jennifer’s site. Some folks might need to have this sort of update.

It would appear temperature is racing ahead of CO2 rising from the compost rapidly piling up in the corridors of the BOM, the poor dears must be in a frenzy having to draw a new map. Perhaps they need a new air conditioner or two and relocation of their thermometers away from the heat exchangers?

Lack of professionalism or integrity readily springs to mind. An example of alarmism in corridors where we expect (and pay for) science to reside. It was recently suggested economic forecasters make weather forecasters look good. Is this a return bout to regain the high ground? The colour red should be one of embarrassment on the faces of those in the BOM who promoted the facade. Or is the purple designation a Freudian slip illustrating their rage over sceptics not accepting the warmist doctrine?

When repeated often enough (especially by fellow travellers) an assertion or deliberate lie morphs into “truth” in the minds of the gullible. Is this yet another example of the politically motivated brainwashing strategy, illustrating the level of infiltration by activism in taxpayer funded agencies (their ABC also springs to mind)?

Hey John have you checked out the BOM station site in Hobart? Easy to find on Google Earth (or Maps) Ellerslie Rd – right at the end (No.20) in amongst the Anglesea Barracks. Isn’t that a great site for a weather station. Come back and tell us what the impact of all those buildings might be.

Don’t know if you are aware that Anthony Watts initiated a series of posts on “How Not To Measure Temperature” regarding the siting of stations in the USA. Following from that, many folks volunteered and most stations in the US were documented and photographed. Some folks visited only one or two places but others trekked all over and did many. A few non-US cities were included. Here is an early post:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/05/26/how-not-to-measure-temperature/
And then a much later one:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/14/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-51/
Mr. Watts has since move the project to ‘ surfacestations.org ’.
I looked, with Google Earth, for the BOM station as you suggested but a post following ‘the surface station project’ outline would be nice.

But taking one month is just cherry picking. We have also had the coldest February for some time. Where a particular week or month stacks up has no bearing on any nation wide trend, and a nationwide trend has no bearing on a global wide trend. It simply becomes an interesting but not particularly valuable statistic.

See how silly it is to ascribe one possible variable as the un-proven dominant factor, and one temperature point, be it a day, a week or a month can simply be observed as something interesting but it certainly does not prove a long term trend. There are many factors which effect CO2 emissions but at the moment only about 15 percent of countries are reducing their CO2 emissions.

Sure, maybe George Washington did chop down the cherry tree, but there are alternatives. There are known instances of cherry tree suicide by axe, for example. And what if a time traveller came back from the future, and realised that the George Washington mythology wouldn’t be complete without a healthy cherry tree, so they chop it down?

I am trying to get the BOM to supply the error bounds for their statement that a new record since 1932 was set for Australian aggregated temperature – so far no co-operation just refferal to the Australian year dataset which contains no error statement. How scientific is that. I also requested an answer to the following question: If this year was over the 1932 record and related to global warming does this mean that gloabal warming was present in 1932?

Not because they are terribly relevant, I think that one temperature reading does not do much for the basic proposition we are exploring; namely whether we have more heat in the atmosphere now than there was in 1932.

Your comment illustrates their very basic “Lack of Pride” in their work.

From a scientific point of view it is always better to get a “more accurate reading” but after you have done that, the next step should be to work out how many significant figures are relevant in the followup processing.

In the situation where we are trying to ascertain whether additional “heat” is accumulating in the Earth’s biosphere I would propose that 3 significant figures is enough and that greater resolution of the analysis would come from a larger number of readings taken over a grid pattern. No doubt satellite temperature measuring systems can do this.

Satellite records would probably illustrate the fickleness of parcels of “hot air” as they move from one temporary location to another over the day and the pointlessness of large numbers of significant figures.

As a number or people have commented here; the BOM’s mission was to create the Impression of a new temperature record in accordance with CAGW theory and they have certainly achieved that political objective.

People remember the 50 degrees C figure, they remember the Purple Heart and so on.

The UK Met office have been predicting extreme heat for some time (because their s/w factors in “global warming” as part of its prediction.

So, no surprise, Oz BOM is now predicting lots of heat too.

Time for the s/w to be tweaked.

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Down south, its actually been one of the coolest summers in ages. A few hot days but no real long periods of extended heat, no run of 5..10 days of 35+, no extended runs of nightly mins of 28+… a week or more recently where we had to drag the blankets out at night. Very pleasant.

We now live about 28 kms from the coast so the heat waves of the Upper Hunter Valley are a distant memory. Here we had one very hot day a few weeks ago. Got to 42 on our verandah. We couldn’t use the A/C because the gold plated power lines couldn’t handle the load. We had a six hour blackout which finished just as the sea breeze cut in. Back to the subject; it was one hot day followed by several cool ones followed by another hotty followed by more cool days. Heatwaves are more than five days above 40 and nights that barely cool. None of those here. I think Abbott should float the idea of a BoM that keeps records only. Sack them all and then sack the CSIRO.

The BBC; the Independent; the Prince of Wales; the Guardian; the New York Times; the Royal Society; 99.9 per cent of celebrities; the Times; the Sunday Times; ABC; NBC; the CSIRO; the Australian government; Tim Yeo; Lord Deben; the UK government; the EU; the UN; the Obama administration; the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors; RIBA; the British Antarctic Survey; the National Academy of Sciences; Sir Paul Nurse; the Sierra Club; the WWF; George Soros; Richard Branson; Tim Flannery; David Suzuki; Michael Moore; Mikhail Gorbachev; the Hon. Sir Jonathan Porritt; Julia Gillard; your kids’ schoolteacher; my kids’ schoolteacher; the Miliband bros; WikipediaThanks to James Delingpole (edited down to fit)

The BoM is just another branch of the goverment remember so the PR and spin is everything for a reason, read the link to understand why the message is all important and not the science behind it. Say what you want but the mushrooms of society lap it up.

Alice Springs gets special treatment? Look at the strange shapes of the contours around the Alice on the animated flicks. Problem is, there ain’t so many weather stations close enough to Alice to cause the shape to change like that. Methinks the contour package is home made or about 50 years old.

Perhaps it’s a spin off from Federal Government intervention in Territory affairs. The colour choice makes me think the BOM are under contract from Revlon to develop lippy shades for the locals.

The Exmouth peninsula seems to get special contour treatment also. Any explanations for the contouring?

Today’s Farm Weekly, section 2 on it’s back page Weather Watch has a heading January hottest month on record It begins – Australia recorded its hottest month on record in January 2013, with both the average mean temperature of 29.68C and the average mean maximum temperature of 36.92C, surpassing previous records set in January 1932. Etc Signed Bureau of Meteorology. We all know it is bull sh!t.

1. Is global ATMOSPHERIC temperature warming unusually in either amount or rate and is it continuing to rise?

Well, yes.

2. Does the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in air control or determine Earth’s temperature?

Its one of the factors that do.

3. Does human CO2 production determine the level of CO2 in air?

There has been a dramatic increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last 150 years. Over this time humans have pumped an awful lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. But this could just be a coincidence. Maybe its leprechauns.

Jo – you need to re-print that map of yours from a few posts back – showing +50c temperatures and dates…
Most of the dates were, to my recollection, ‘pre global warming/climate change’ – but let’s not put the alarmists off with facts, eh..?

Please don’t feel bad about it. Our official weather predictions don’t stand up any better than yours. And they sometimes try to make as much hay out of them as they can. If anything can be made sensational then it will be made sensational — doggone it, I think I’ve discovered a new natural law there.

Am I the only one who’s surprised that the BOM didn’t claim that the failure to reach the predicted temperatures was itself evidence of “extreme climate”, or whatever they call it? They missed a trick there, didn’t they, or wasn’t I paying attention?

The climate’s so bad, you can’t even predict it, any more – or the BOM can’t, anyway (and the British Met Office gave up even pretending to do a decent job about twenty years ago).

I think this is another case where the forecast is so widely repeated that most people end up thinking this is what the temperature actually is! Think back, how often does anyone actually quote today’s temperature on the news? Now, how many times do they quote the forecast for tomorrow, or the day after or next week? Which one do you remember? It doesn’t matter what they then turn back their final forecast (or actual report) to, because the inflated early forecast is all that is remembered.

Here in Canada, weather forecasters have stopped giving the actual temperature when it gets hot (high 20s or 30s) because it is not scary enough – now they add the “humidex” value to this and quote what it “feels like” as though this is the actual temp. Thus 25 becomes “feels like 32 – and it’s only May!”.

How good are you (or anyone) at actually “feeling” temperatures? Since we are usually either inside or, if outside, then we are doing something making us feel warmer (or colder), we rely on what we are told the air temperature is. But what the temperature actually is is rarely given – instead we have forecasts and humidex numbers (or wind-chill numbers in the winter) all designed to make it sound ‘worse than we thought’. This would be fine if we accepted that the weather reports are just stingers to keep us watching during the commercial breaks in the news bulletins, but now we have politicians spending big chunks of tax-money to combat something that pretty much cannot be altered.

It is about time we called out weather forecasters on their accuracy, or accept that they are just light entertainment.

I posted a comment on the Guardian blog that you linked to, with a link to your post and politely suggested that to be fair and balanced the bolgs’ author should alert his readers to the fact that the predictions made did not eventuate and were over hyped. My comment was

removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted.

So according to Damien Carrington and The Guardian pointing out facts about climate are not appropriate “community standards”.

Maybe the Australian BOM should learn from the BBC on realism in weather forecasting. No seriously. The weather forecasts for a the next 36-48 hours are by the hour. For the following 3 days they are every 3 hours. For 4 days further ahead it is just a range of temperatures for day and night. Based on the British Met Office, they have learnt to incorporate the uncertainties.

See for Manchester, where I live. http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/7281603. At the time of writing (Nearly midnight on Thurs 7th) the range of temperatures are 0/9C for day and -6/6 for night. That relates to be the forecast being extremely cold to quite mild. Try this for any place in the UK – e.g. London. Less detailed are for foreign (Non-UK) places. But try some Australian cities.

This is hilarious. ‘OMG conspiracy!!1! They predicted the weather and they were wrong!!!111!!1′
Seriously? They’re not magicians. They created new colours because by their predictions, it looked like it was going to reach those temperatures at that time. This was then revised, as happens constantly, because that’s what science does, it reviews and revises.
Jesus Christ I worry sometimes.

Well you should because it is generally acknowledged by meteorologists that their forecasts are about 50% right. This is more or less a tacit admission that the forecasts are random, and random behaviour is intrinsically unpredictable. This means that the models used for forecasting are not accurate at all and means that we actually do not understand the physics behind the weather.

We do have gravity worked out because we can forecast the behaviour of, say, a projectile fired into the air and its landing spot. Newton’s Law in this respect is well understood and our forecasts of the projectile trajectory would fall into the 90+ % success rate.

But we do not have the weather worked out despite the billions of research dollars thrown at the problem. The late Fred Hoyle pointed out that when this happens in a science, it means that the problem is being investigated with the wrong ideas, ie., the physics of the problem is wrong.

I should add that weather is recognised as a non-linear, chaotic system that cannot be predicted.

The BOM created the new colour legend as a consequence of its computer modelling of the weather system, and that the forecast was not achieved simply tells us that the model has to be wrong.

The real problem is that the global warmers or climate alarmists don’t or can’t, the difference is moot, accept that maybe the theories behind their models might be wrong. Hence they look for anything else to explain their faulty forecasts. It’s a real worry when the likes of Kevin Trenberth question the validity of the data when in effect he should have been questioning the validity of his climate modelling.

I find it interesting that both the BOM and Jim Salinger (ex NIWA- NZ) have used this hot summer on both sides of the Tassie to push the possibility of new heat records for both the Australian continent and New Zealand, the latter record that recently celebrated its 40th birthday (Feb 7th)BTW.

For Salinger in particular and possibly for those at the Bom pushing this wishful thinking in the Australian setting, the fact that the old temperature records are still here and getting older must stick in the craw somewhat!

It was actually embarrassing to watch Salinger play his hand like this and fail. How dare nature not cooperate! I wasn’t surprised though. Ten years ago when it was part of his job to predict as far ahead as only 3 months he failed to foresee the last great drought in our part of N.Z. I was at a meeting where Salinger addressed a public audience and admitted this fact after being questioned by myself,an interested lay person, and a dairy farmer. Both of us saw the signs of drought as soon as it started. I guess the famous Dr was too busy saving the planet to actually pay attention to a small bunch of people contributing to his salary!